I'm Lorenzo, and I'm writing from beautiful Napoli, in the South of Italy.
I've always been a music lover, especially hard rock, metal of all kinds and progressive: I've been playing guitar for almost 25 years, but never consistently enough to be REALLY good I'm afraid
My real hidden love, though, is late romantic symphonic music: from my absolute favourite Tchaikovsky, to Rimsky-Korsakov, Dvorak, Liszt and others. Needless to say, whenever rock and orchestras meet somehow, I'm usually in heaven!In my late teen years I tried playing with some of the existing tools to create my own music. I still remember my first scores using Deluxe Music on Amiga, and how I then switched to Cakewalk when moving to a Windows machine. I wrote a lot at the time (I still have most of those MIDI files in a folder) but rarely in a very structured form: meaning the vast majority of the compositions where ideas I had that never fully developed, apart for a few cases. For a very short time I tinkered with Sibelius, to work on an idea I wanted to develop as a Symphonic Poem, but unfortunately that didn't last much due to lack of time. When I finally switched to Linux I started playing with Rosegarden for a little bit (which at the time where the closest thing I could find to Cakewalk), before study and work got the best of me and I had to put that side of me on a hold.
Now that 15 years have passed, I decided to give it a go again, and I was amazed when I recently "discovered" Lilypond! I immediately fell in love with the syntax and the approach, as it's very similar to LaTex (which I often use at work for my own documents and presentations) and quite easy to get into (although I guess much harder to master). I never formally studied music, I'm mostly self-taught, so while in time I learned how to write music the "proper" way using visual score applications, I still can't really read music if not very slowly: Lilypond made the process of writing ideas and music down incredibly fast and effective, especially if you know the fundamentals as I do. At the moment I'm experimenting with Frescobaldi as a frontend, and simply using Timidity++ in interface mode for playing it out: I've downloaded a few soundfonts here and there to try and get some better results, but I already know that won't be enough, which is why I'm sure I'll come here often to improve my knowledge and eventually prepare a proper setup! The LinuxMusicians wiki has an article on the best composer's toolset, which is how I found out about you guys.
The main objective is quite "simple": finally write that symphonic work I've had in my head this whole time! I've already started writing the first movement of what I think will be a symphony (hold for laughter), written down a dozen more ideas just waiting to be developed (hoping they won't end up as last time!), and I plan to revive that old symphonic poem attempt as well soon. Once that's done, I'd love to focus more on my other musical side, and experiment with rock/metal/progressive again, hook my guitar and Pod pro, and so on, but I already know the process will be completely different than the one I'm going through now, so one thing at a time!
Apologies for the extremely long intro... I promise my next posts will be much shorter!
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